The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “I’m twenty-eight. Almost mature.”

  “A baby. A mere child, barely out of diapers. Far too young to do what you do. Why, the curandera who tried to train me in Mexico wasn’t allowed to heal anyone except herself until she was thirty. And she couldn’t work on anyone outside her family until she was forty.”

  “That sounds luxuriously sane,” Madrone admitted. “But we don’t live in sane times.”

  “At any rate, you need some time off. Or at least some stimulation besides the company of one crotchety old woman. Have you heard from Sage and Nita and Holybear? When are they coming back?”

  “Not for another few weeks.”

  “They should be down here with you. The house is empty without them.”

  “They can’t leave their trial ponds until their experiments are complete,” Madrone said. “You should be more appreciative of their efforts.”

  “How do I appreciate fifty-seven new breeds of waterborne bacteria?”

  “Bacteria that can neutralize toxins might mean that our descendants could eat shellfish out of the bay again someday. If any of us survive. Which I’m beginning to think is less and less likely.”

  “Everyone’s so gloomy today,” Maya complained. “Even the ghosts are intimating doom.”

  Madrone smiled. “Isn’t that a ghost’s prerogative?”

  “Maybe. But it worries me to see you so down in the mouth.”

  “I just feel bad. About Consuelo, about Sandy. About everybody. I feel like I’ve failed them all.”

  Maya patted her arm. There was nothing to say, really. She herself still felt bad about everyone she’d ever known who’d died, from Sandy back to Cameron Graham Rosenthal, who’d died of AIDS downstairs sixty years ago when the house was still divided into two separate flats. Yes, she still missed him from time to time, missed dressing up with him and strolling through the Castro, making private comments about all the beautiful young men they passed. She’d been living off Johanna’s charity then, just back from Mexico, trying to write. And the beautiful young men had not yet wasted to living skeletons, to die blotched with lesions, gasping for breath.

  “I wish I could help you,” Maya said.

  “You do, madrina. You help a lot.” Madrone closed her eyes. Really, she could almost sink back into trance, here in the sun with Maya’s hand to soothe her. When you’re tired enough, Madrone thought, the ch’i worlds are just an eye blink, a breath away. Like yesterday, watching beside Consuelo’s closed coffin, surrounded by lighted candles in the Sisters’ living room. Rosa sat, looking solemn, almost hidden behind a huge bouquet of calla lilies.

  “I’m sorry,” Madrone had said to her. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Rosa had said, with tears pooling at the bottom of her eyes.

  Not my fault but my inadequacy, Madrone said to herself, settling down to keep vigil. She had focused on the coffin, letting herself sink into the searching trance, moving down through the wood of the box, until she could see, with her inner eye, the body, shaped by light, its energy form already starting to come apart. Traces of Consuelo’s spirit, shreds of personality, lingered like wisps of scent. Madrone sniffed emotion—anger, outrage, a sense of being cheated, the aggrieved surprise of the unexpectedly dead. She felt sweat on her face and willed herself to breathe deeper, to sink down further. This was the worst level, and she could only get through it by saying over and over again, “Not mine. Not my pain. Not my grief.”

  Down. And yes, there was something else—that elusive something she had felt after Sandy died. But what was it? Could a microbe have a personality, or was she just anthropomorphizing—what? If only she could see whatever it was, grab hold of it, learn how it spread and how to defeat it. She could track it, patient as any hunter, but what was there to scent but elusive traces in the air, shifts in energy? Not a flu virus, not something patterned on the old HIV series or a spirochete like syphilis or Lyme disease. They each had their characteristic signature in the energy realms, and she could recognize them as easily as she could identify mugwort or comfrey in an overgrown garden. No, this was something else, and she was beginning to recognize its feel but she still couldn’t see it, only follow, down and down.…

  “Where are you drifting to?” Maya said sharply. “Madrone! Come back!”

  Maya’s hand gripped her arm sharply and brought her back with a jerk. She felt a sharp sense of vertigo and fought down nausea.

  “Diosa, Maya, don’t do that to me!”

  “I called your name three times.”

  “Really? I didn’t know I went so far down.”

  “You shouldn’t trance like that, unprotected, ungrounded. You didn’t even cast a circle.”

  “I didn’t mean to trance. I was just thinking about Consuelo again, and the virus—oh, all right, I guess I was starting to search for it.”

  “You be careful. You’re becoming obsessed with the thing, and obsession opens the door to the Bad Reality. Did I ever explain the old curandera’s theory to you?”

  Madrone smiled. “At least a dozen times.”

  “Well, I’d better explain it again, because you don’t seem to get it. Doña Elena used to say that there was the Good Reality, or El Mundo Bueno, literally the Good World, and the Bad Reality, El Mundo Malo, and they were always vying with each other. In the Good Reality you have a mild headache; in the Bad Reality you have a fatal brain disease. In the Good Reality, you catch hold of the rail as your foot slips; in the Bad Reality, you miss, slide down the stairs, and break your neck.

  “We walk in the Good Reality as if we were treading the thin skin on warm milk. It’s always possible to break through and drown. When you take a foolish risk, especially in magical work, as you just did, it’s like sticking out your tongue at fate, daring the Bad Reality to suck you down. And they say that El Mundo Malo never passes up a dare.”

  “Who says?”

  “They. You know. The amorphous, ubiquitous ‘they.’ Ignore their advice at your peril.”

  “I always listen to your advice, madrina. I just don’t always take it.”

  “There is a hopeful side of Doña Elena’s teaching,” Maya went on. “Even in El Mundo Malo, the Good Reality is always just on the other side of the surface of things. If you can learn to reach and pull yourself through, you can make miracles.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Madrone said, “as more and more miracles seem to be called for.” She stood up and placed her teacup back on the tray. “Have you finished your tea?”

  “No, I’ve been talking to you. Leave it with me, I’ll wash the cups later. And have you had any breakfast yet?”

  “Are you hungry? I’ll get you something,” Madrone offered.

  “No. I want you to eat. I’m fine.”

  “I will, when I’m hungry.”

  “Go back to sleep. Get some rest. You’re worn out.”

  “I will.” Madrone leaned over and kissed Maya’s cheek. “But later. Today’s my day to represent the healers at Council, and I’m already late.”

  The domed Council Hall nestled between the two hills of Twin Peaks. Madrone hurried out of the gondola that had brought her up the hill and dashed down the steps of the tower two by two. The session was already under way as she entered the hall through the Gate of Air, in the east.

  The Council was open to everyone, but each neighborhood and each work collective picked spokespeople who attended one day each week, as gift work. All the healers took turns, so each was required to devote only a day every month or two to the meetings. Some guilds picked representatives who served for a fixed term, providing continuity. But no healer could be spared for weeks or months.

  In the four corners of the room were stationed the Voices who spoke in trance for the Four Sacred Things. In the north, direction of earth, the first of the Voices wore the mask of the White Deer, the sacred fallow deer that roamed Point Reyes Peninsula and the slopes of Tamalpais. The bearer of the Hawk mask with its curved, sharp beak, guardian o
f the creatures of the air, sat in the east. Coyote, wearing a wooden mask painted with dots and stripes of brilliant color, sat in the south as the trickster guardian of fire, of the energy systems. In the west, in a mask with gleaming scales and geometric designs of red and black, sat Salmon, guardian of the waters, symbol of return and regeneration and hope. Long ago, the bay and the streams that flowed through the city had been the southern boundary of salmon country, receiving their yearly run of fish returning to spawn and die. But the pink salmon, the California salmon, and the great oceangoing steelhead trout no longer returned to the toxic bay. The great dream of the Water Council and the Toxics Council was to restore the salmon run. Holybear always said he would know their work was successful when he could sit on his front porch and fish. Although in point of fact, Nita would interject, by the time the fish made their way to their neighborhood, they’d be ready to drop their eggs and rot, and regular spawning runs through the city’s streams might be a mixed blessing.

  Among them walked the Speaker for the Voices, who was always either a man dressed as a woman or a woman dressed as a man. Today the Speaker was a tall, muscular man who wore a beautifully embroidered Japanese kimono and silver bracelets that chimed like bells whenever he moved.

  The room was circular, lit by skylights and warmed by a fire in the central hearth. The four Voices each had a low pillow-covered platform to sit on in their appropriate direction. Everyone else sat in a rough circle on an assortment of pillows, chairs, and battered old couches. Council would eventually replace them with beautiful cushions and fine, crafted seats, as they had gradually recycled the old scraps of carpeting that once covered the floor and laid down rugs that were works of art, woven of handspun wool, with soft but vibrant colors and intricate patterns of the sacred symbols, the quartered circle with the double spiral in the center.

  The Voices gave an aura of ceremony to what was otherwise a fairly informal gathering. As she made her way to a seat, Madrone felt their power flowing through the room. A chant began singing itself inside her head:

  When we are gone they will remain,

  Wind and rock, fire and rain,

  They will remain when we return,

  The wind will blow and the fire will burn.

  She looked into the eyes of Coyote, painted spirals that seemed to draw her in and in. Maybe she was falling into trance herself. The humans around her seemed ephemeral, inconsequential, while the masked figures became eternal. And yet she could clearly remember the meeting when they established the Voices. It was only about five years before. She had been a devoted attender of meetings at that time, a stage everyone had to go through, Maya claimed. There was criticism of the meetings—they were too long, too heady; people left feeling drained and ungrounded. Of course, that was the nature of meetings, someone pointed out; but weren’t we here to transform things? someone else asked. Somehow the question got around to the representation of the Four Sacred Things. Many people felt that nothing could truly be decided when the Four Sacred Things were not present. The animals, the plants, the waters had no voice in Council, and yet every decision should take them into account. After seemingly interminable argument, they had one of those unlooked-for bursts of collective creativity, or perhaps madness, and established this ritual, where masked representatives for each of the sacred elements sat in trance in Council, channeling the Voices of wind, fire, water, and earth.

  “May the balance be restored,” she murmured as she seated herself, because that was the appropriate thing to say in the presence of any manifestation of the Four Sacred Things, or when entering or leaving a sacred space. She said it under her breath, so as not to interrupt anything.

  She slid onto a couch beside a short-haired, bony, brown woman with the muscles of a construction worker. The woman winked at her.

  “I’m Surya,” she said. “Carpenters’ Guild.”

  “Madrone, of Healers’,” she murmured back, feeling a little thread of attraction that she was far too tired to pursue. She was sinking into trance, and that was not appropriate for a Council meeting. But as she looked around the room, all she could see were energies, earth and air and fire and water congealing into bone and breath and nerve and blood, emerging into form and fading back into formlessness. They played through the colors of light coming through the skylights and through the forms carved into the beams and the lintels of the doorways. They played through the genetic bequests of the ancestors she saw reflected in the skin colors and bone structures and textures of hair around her, east, south, west, and north: Europe, Africa, Asia, the Islands, the Americas, all the waters of the world had flowed over this spirit-haunted land, leaving something washed ashore in their wake. Ivory, sepia, raw umber, burnt umber, ebony, charcoal, sienna—a palette of earth tones, like colors out of a paint box. Auspicious, they called it, when children of ancestors from all four directions sat together and the circle was whole.

  About fifty people were present, finishing up a discussion about reconciling the solar and lunar calendars, a topic about which Madrone had nothing to say. Salal, who was Crow of the meeting for the day, nodded at Madrone to show that she was aware of her entrance. Sal was one of the most skilled facilitators, and Madrone was glad to see her there, looking calm and composed as she always did, graceful in her cross-legged posture, her hair dyed a shocking red and rising from her head in flamelike peaks, her dark eyes darting around the room, reading the mood of the group. Salal was not easily intimidated or confused, and she was unshakable under pressure.

  I will just close my eyes, for one moment, to rest them, Madrone told herself. The buzz of voices and the flying hands of the speakers simultaneously translating their words into Sign were hypnotic. Although the main discussion was in English, side conversations went on around the edges of the room in Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Tagalog. Every neighborhood in the City claimed a mother tongue of its own to cultivate. With global transportation systems broken down and the Stewards still jamming the airwaves after twenty years, who knew, these days, what survived in Canton or Cairo or Manila or Mexico? The City’s neighborhoods might well be the last preserves of their languages and cultures.

  Lulled by the voices, Madrone dreamed the domed hall as the four-chambered heart of the City, where she could rest, feeling its pulse, taking the measure of its beat, listening for what swam hidden in its secret veins, the spirochete, the parasite, the virus. Oh, it was deceptive, this strength, this vigor. But she could hear what whined below, like one small mosquito in a large room when you were trying to sleep.…

  “Madrone?”

  The sound of her name jolted her into wakefulness. She opened her eyes. Salal was looking at her expectantly.

  “Can you give us a report from the Healers’ Council? What’s happening with this latest epidemic? How dangerous is it?”

  Madrone rose to speak. She looked around the room at eyes of every shape and color, all focused on her. That was what she did, sometimes, when she had to look into a mother’s eyes and tell her her child would not live. She would focus on the shape, and the color of the iris, and the way the lid curved over the surface, and the way the lashes were set into the lid. Eye after eye, each one a small cauldron, container of water. A vessel. A lens.

  “It’s bad. Very bad.” Madrone spoke, as they all did when addressing Council, in English augmented with Sign. “It begins as a low-grade fever, like a mild flu. Headache, muscle aches, congestion. In a small percentage of patients, that’s all it is, and after a week or so they recover. But most go through a crisis, where the fever shoots up suddenly, high enough to cause brain damage or death, especially in children. And for pregnant women it’s disastrous. The high fever triggers labor prematurely and can seriously damage the fetus even if it survives.” These were the facts, laid out for them, but she felt compelled to add more. “We’ve dealt with a lot of diseases over the last ten years, one epidemic after another, if not on quite the same scale as ’38. But this one scares me.” She found, as alway
s, that her spoken words could lie with their intonation, with the flat control of their delivery, but her fingers could not conceal her emotions. “I won’t pretend it doesn’t. It’s the worst thing we’ve had to deal with in a decade.”

  There was silence. If Madrone was scared, they knew it was bad. Usually they counted on her for reassurance.

  “You’ve tried to identify the cause?” Sal asked.

  “We suspect another mutant virus, but we don’t really know yet. None of our antivirals work against it, or any of our other drugs.”

  Silence again.

  “Shouldn’t we evacuate the pregnant women?” someone asked.

  “Where to?” Madrone asked. “The damn thing appeared upriver almost as soon as it did down here.”

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  What she wanted to say was, Do anything you ever wanted to do and haven’t done, now, quick, while you still can. Eat the berries unripe off the vines, set your caged birds free. But she couldn’t say that. Ghost eyes looked at her. Her hands, upraised in a gesture of helplessness, were all the answer she could give, but for the benefit of the blind, she added, “I don’t know.”

  “What kind of support do the healers need from the Council?” Sal asked.

  A miraculous appearance of the Virgin. A bleeding statue with healing powers. A curandera with herbs known only to the Indians. A wonder drug. “We’re okay, I guess,” Madrone said. “We could use someone else at the hospital to help with herbal preparations, now that Sandy’s gone.”

  “I’ll find someone.” A woman spoke up.

  “What about personal support?” asked Surya, at Madrone’s side. “You look done in.”

  “I’m just tired. Not enough sleep. But that’s what you sign on for when you become a midwife.”

  “Every healer I know looks about the same,” a young man said. “Maybe we can’t offer a miracle cure, but at least we could take some of the load of other work off you. Your gardens and your households.”

  Madrone opened her mouth to protest, but considering the state of Black Dragon House, the weeds in the garden, and the hundred chores she hadn’t gotten around to since Sandy died, she shut it again.